CHAPTER I

Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones was bunkered.
Having been bunkered many times in the past, and knowing
that she would be bunkered upon many occasions in
the future, Miss Jones was not disposed to take a tragic
view of the situation. The little white ball was
all too secure down there in the sand; as she had
played her first nine, and at least paid her respects
to the game, she could now scale the hazard and curl
herself into a comfortable position. It was a
seductively lazy spring day, the very day for making
arm-chairs of one’s hazards. And let it
be set down in the beginning that Miss Jones was more
given to a comfortable place than to a tragic view.

Katherine Wayneworth Jones, affectionately known to
many friends in many lands as Katie Jones, was an
“army girl.” And that not only for
the obvious reasons: not because her people had
been of the army, even unto the second and third generations,
not because she had known the joys and jealousies
of many posts, not even because bachelor officers were
committed to the habit of proposing to her—­those
were but the trappings. She was an army girl
because “Well, when you know her, you don’t
have to be told, and if you don’t know her you
can’t be,” a floundering friend had once
concluded her exposition of why Katie was so “army.”
For her to marry outside the army would be regarded
as little short of treason.

To-day she was giving a little undisturbing consideration
to that thing of her marrying. For it was her
twenty-fifth birthday, and twenty-fifth birthdays
are prone to knock at the door of matrimonial possibilities.
Just then the knock seemed answered by Captain Prescott.
Unblushingly Miss Jones considered that doubtless
before the summer was over she would be engaged to
him. And quite likely she would follow up the
engagement with a wedding. It seemed time for
her to be following up some of her engagements.

She did not believe that she would at all mind marrying
Harry Prescott. All his people liked all hers,
which would facilitate things at the wedding; she
would not be rudely plunged into a new set of friends,
which would be trying at her time of life. Everything
about him was quite all right: he played a good
game of golf, not a maddening one of bridge, danced
and rode in a sort of joy of living fashion. And
she liked the way he showed his teeth when he laughed.
She always thought when he laughed most unreservedly
that he was going to show more of them; but he never
did; it interested her.